


Echoes of Silence

by sinisterkid92



Category: Timeless (TV 2016)
Genre: F/M, Post Season 2, Smut lite
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-20
Updated: 2018-05-20
Packaged: 2019-05-09 09:24:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,823
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14713430
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sinisterkid92/pseuds/sinisterkid92
Summary: "So far she had a pulse, she was breathing, all her limbs were intact. Those were blessings these days. Blessings were few these days. Blessings were none. She could not conjure up anything to be thankful for, couldn’t count them on her fingers and suck on them like a hard piece of candy. Couldn’t linger. "After season 2 the time team is in mourning, trying to deal with the fallout of losing Rufus. In it Flynn is there to keep her steady and offer comfort.





	Echoes of Silence

The silence was audible. Short static and pressing against her eardrums like the absent humming of machinery. Occasionally, the whining echo of closing doors and shuffling feet across aging floorboards would interrupt the silence. Someone exiting their room to get food or use the bathroom. Otherwise everyone stayed where they were.

It was a hollow silence, not the chaotic silence that erupted when she pressed her palms against her ears, where she could almost hear her heartbeat and the nearly there chaos that was happening inside her to keep her alive. Sometimes, just to escape the absence lingering in the small house, the panic brought on by too much loss, she would press her hands against her ears just to remind herself she was alive.

So far she had a pulse, she was breathing, all her limbs were intact. Those were blessings these days. Blessings were few these days. Blessings were none. She could not conjure up anything to be thankful for, couldn’t count them on her fingers and suck on them like a hard piece of candy. Couldn’t linger. 

Rufus was gone. Amy was gone. Her mother was gone. Rittenhouse had ruined whatever she had with Wyatt. She’d given everything she had to this, to be good and to do good and all she’d done was lose. All they ended up doing was mourning. 

Waiting and mourning. 

Ever since the future-them left, leaving questions unanswered and just fueling confusions about the path they were about to depart on, there was just a small piece of hope that things could be better. A plan, a way to go.

Months to go. 

With Jiya working on updating the coding and software of the lifeboat and Connor going back to his roots of turning wrenches to do the hardware updates, it left the rest of them wandering. Wyatt mourning, again. The wife he thought he’d miraculously got back alive again turned out to be someone he did not know, a stranger and not his Jessica. The family he believed he was about to start, the family he once was robbed the possibility of and now lost.

Lucy and Flynn were left wandering. Mourning in fits of anger and despair that left them in each others rooms more often than not. There was a boxing bag that Christopher had gotten both the men after their brawl and Flynn taught her how to punch. Even though she wanted to scream most of all the punching was a good second option. Punching until she was dripping sweat and her knuckles turned red despite the tape and the gloves. 

Punching was doing something. 

Once, she would have turned to Wyatt. There is no space for the person she was now with him. If she started to bare herself she didn’t know how he’d receive it, how he’d deal with it. She’d changed so much, becoming who she needed to be in the face of it all. She didn’t need what he had to give her, what he could offer. She had nothing to offer him. After all of it, she didn’t want to give him anything. 

It left the two of them.

The house was tiny with a cellar with the boxing bag hanging from the ceiling alongside some sad looking exercise equipment. Homeland Security had come to realize that this mission was a long-term one and the best way to ensure their safety and wellbeing was to house them in the middle of nowhere none of them could place on a map. Only Jiya had the coordinates since she took the lifeboat there, the rest arrived in the back of a windowless van.

For weeks, there were no trips. It wasn’t unusual for there to be a long break but they were getting restless. Each moment passing was another one closer to their first one without Rufus. It was foolish to think they’d be able to finish the upgrades and save Rufus before Rittenhouse decided what to do next now that the people in charge of the time traveling had been taken out. 

Time had never felt more like a being in itself until then, it moved into the house and was a steady reminder of what they’d lost and how each second separated them from that moment. 

So she punched bags as Flynn stood by her coaching her movements until the movements settled in her bones. Muscles ached while he shouted commands – left right hook, left left right, and so on until her arms started to shake. 

Though she had her own room – a tiny square that fit a bed, a small dresser, and a window that couldn’t be opened that overlooked a flat landscape revealing just how desolate they were – she would most often be found in his room. It was at the back of the house behind the kitchen with a door that once had probably opened to a porch but now just a two feet drop to the ground. 

After showering, hair still wet and plastered against her back, she would walk towards his room without thinking. The rest of the members living there must have noticed by now how she never slept in her own room. His room didn’t have the claustrophobic view of open landscapes hers has. His window looked out over the barn with the lifeboat in it. 

There were no lights in the house, the only electricity went to the kitchen appliances and water heating. At night the were left with torches and candles. The first days after the rushed move to the house they hardly spoke a word to each other. There was something about the silence that made it so hard to break. As if speaking would disrupt the mourning and reset them to day one. 

Yet, when the spoke it had importance, each word meant something even when it seemed mundane. 

He started to teach her how to shoot, too. Lined up cans on a row for her to shoot, just like she’d seen people do in movies. Taught her gun safety, how to load, how to squeeze the trigger and aim. She was getting less terrible, the hits not accidental anymore. The first time they went out to practice Jiya and Connor had run out of the barn in panic, believing they were being attacked by Rittenhouse for a moment until they’d seen that it was only them. 

Wyatt had been watching from the window in the kitchen. Lucy had seen his face grey and sunken, watching with an almost-jealousy. Maybe, she thought, he’d believed she’d take him back as if nothing had happened in between it all. Too much had happened, otherwise she wouldn’t be out there learning how to shoot so that next time she wouldn’t miss. 

That room at the back of the house with a door that led to nowhere was their sanctuary. There was nothing sexual about it at first, even though the others thought so. With her head against his chest she found comfort in the heartbeat of another person. This other person was alive with a chaos inside him to keep it so. Was it not poetic that their minds were equal in chaos as the hidden away insides of them? The grief, pain, the anger and the pockets of happiness and joy that would spurt out of them and settle like shame, at first.

They got better at joy, better at smiling. She found that she liked his smile.

The physical comfort of another human being, the nearness and warmth of them was addictive. She’d always been a physical person, seeking out intimacy with others to find her belonging. This was not any different. Even though he was unlike any man she’d met before. 

He was alive. He was alive. Each morning she woke up with the revelation he was still there and each night she went to sleep with the comfort of his heartbeat. His arms were steady around her, holding her together as she held him together in the small bed in the small room in the small house in the small world they got all to themselves.

Of course she reached out to touch him one night. His jaw unshaven and rough against the pads of her fingers, eyes on her soft and heavy all at once. Five weeks of deafening silence, of waiting and grieving, she can’t stand the distance between her and him and the rest of the world. She wants to bridge the gap and feel alive. 

He looked at her with a question in his eyes, jaw slack and expectant of a response. No, she shook her head, this was not a declaration of love. Not yet, they hadn’t arrived there, yet. This was comfort, something good in everything wretched and difficult. An oasis in a desert. 

Flynn kissed like a man starved. Pulled her into himself and helped her get lost in him and him in her. In him she realized all of the metaphors were true; time stopped and sped up all at once. He wrapped his arms so tightly around her she was crushed on top of him. 

This was joy, she repeated in her head. Over and over again. This is joy this is joy this is joy. It echoed with the declaration that he was alive, he was here, he was alive. Those two things where the most important. Joy and life, in all the wretched and all the terrible that had happened, his beating heartbeat and tongue brushing against her own, this gave her strength to carry on. She pushed her hand under his shirt, the warm flesh hard and soft all at once as her fingertips pushed upward. 

Some day they would have to come to the realization that this was their life now. Dreams about who they’d lost returning would have to turn to grieving that the dreams were just dreams. That was not today. They could get lost in each other here, find comfort in that they’re alive and still fighting, 

When their clothes were gone, discarded in piles on the floor, his hands cupped her breasts gently, almost devoid of lust instead filled with reverence, she tilted her head back, placing her hands over his. She got it, she wanted to tell him, Everything was overwhelming nowadays. The feel of naked skin against naked skin, the presence of a body that was warm, willing, that responded to his touch. 

It wasn’t love, not yet, when he moved inside of her. It was something different, something she hadn’t had with anyone else. It was joy. It was life. It was reverence of the intimacy, weighing heavy yet weightless in it all. 

Their soft huffs of breaths, breathless moans, and soundless cries barely disturbed the silence in the house. Their small world kept spinning, and for the first time in a long time, it didn’t feel like she was about to fall off.

**Author's Note:**

> Hope you liked this one! 
> 
> If you want to follow my **tumblr** it is distractednerdish, and there I post all my fics, even some that I don't post here, and I flail a lot about Timeless ;)


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